Green Martians

Green Martians are a formidable people whose communal institutions turn survival on a resource-poor Mars into a system of selection, military training, and emotional restraint. Their eggs, children, and even relationships are governed by collective needs, yet individual bonds persist beneath that order: Sola’s hidden family history and John Carter’s trust with Woola and his thoats reveal forms of care the society does not readily recognize.

Appearance and Community

The young Green Martians Carter first observes hatch with disproportionately large heads, small bodies, long necks, and six limbs: two arms, two legs, and a middle pair that can serve either purpose. Their eyes protrude at the sides of the head and can point independently, allowing them to look in different directions at once; small, cup-shaped ears and slit-like noses complete their unusual features. Their skin is pale yellow-green in childhood and darkens toward olive in adulthood, with adult males darker than females. The young look markedly unlike the towering warriors encountered later, whose height and bearing make them formidable figures even in a world where Earth-born Carter’s agility gives him an unexpected advantage.

Carter finds a community of roughly thirty thousand Green Martians ranging across an arid and semi-arid region between forty and eighty degrees south latitude, bounded by two fertile tracts. Its headquarters stands in the southwest of that territory, near the crossing of two Martian canals. The group camps in a deserted city whose buildings appear to have been uninhabited for years, perhaps ages. Its large plaza and surrounding structures accommodate hundreds of its people, while the city’s abandoned grandeur sets their mobile encampment against the remains of an older, settled world.

Reproduction and Collective Upbringing

Green Martian reproduction is organized through long-term selection rather than a household-based family structure. Each adult female produces about thirteen eggs per year. Eggs that pass tests of size, weight, and specific gravity are stored in underground vaults; a council of twenty chieftains examines them annually and destroys all but about one hundred of the most suitable from each year’s supply. After five years of selection, the chosen eggs are transferred to nearly airtight incubators, where sunlight hatches them after a further five-year period. The hatch Carter witnesses is described as typical: almost all the eggs hatch within two days, while the fate of the few that do not is unknown.

Incubators are hidden in remote locations because discovery by another tribe could leave a community without children for five years. The eggs hatchlings see in the incubator have therefore already passed through years of controlled storage and selection. Afterward, children are not raised by their biological parents. The females who happen to capture them as they leave the incubator become their foster mothers, and the young are treated as common children of the community. Sola, for example, becomes foster mother to another woman’s child despite having only recently begun laying eggs herself.

The children emerge physically developed apart from their smaller size. Their upbringing, as Carter describes it, centers on learning to speak and handle weapons, which are given to them from their first year. The system recognizes neither a reliable connection between child and biological mother nor a practical means of identifying fathers. Carter contrasts this absence of parental and filial love with human family bonds, and interprets the system as one cause of the loss of compassion among the Green Martians. He also situates it within the hardship of a dying planet: when resources are dwindling, each additional life is described as a burden on the community. The text further notes that defective children are killed and that selection favors the hardiest, linking childhood survival to the same severe calculus as egg selection.

Violence, Animals, and the Uses of Kindness

Military force is central to Green Martian life. Carter’s first close encounter with the warriors shifts from the threat of capture or death to their view of him as an unusual discovery after he demonstrates agility beyond what they expect. Their weapons include long spears and rifles made of light but exceptionally hard materials; the rifles fire explosive radium projectiles and are described as effective at extreme ranges. The warriors’ ability to use such weapons, and the community’s practice of arming children early, make martial competence a feature of life from youth onward.

The same severity governs the treatment of animals. Green Martian warriors control their thoats with blows when the mounts resist commands, and a rider thrown off may face a lethal struggle with the animal. Carter chooses a different method after his experience with Woola: he first establishes that the thoats cannot unseat him, then gradually wins their confidence through kind treatment. In a few days, the animals follow him closely, rub their snouts against him, and respond readily to his commands. The warriors regard this transformation as evidence of some unknown power, but Carter explains it as kindness and as a practical advantage: reliable mounts improve a warrior’s effectiveness in battle and on the march.

Woola’s actions extend that contrast beyond training. While Carter remains captive among Green Martians, the hound guards him closely and twice saves his life. When a great white ape is about to attack Carter, Woola intervenes, giving him time to escape the immediate danger. Later, after Carter becomes separated from his companions in a barren region, the hound tracks him across the waste and curls beside him despite its own exhaustion and hunger. Woola’s arrival brings Carter relief, but also anxiety over what may have happened to Dejah Thoris, whom Woola had been commanded to accompany. For Carter, this loyalty is not merely useful: he embraces the starving animal, and the scene makes visible the reciprocal bond that his approach to animals has cultivated.

Sola, Kinship, and Hidden History

Sola’s own life exposes the difference between Green Martian public custom and private attachment. She tells Carter that she feels unlike her people and has known love in a society that, in her account, offers its members no hope of returning it. Her mother, physically smaller than the size preferred by the chieftains for maternity and less cruel than most Green Martian women, avoided their society and wandered alone through the deserted avenues or among the nearby hills. There she met a young warrior assigned to guard the feeding thoats and zitidars. Their conversations grew from practical matters to their hopes and feelings; when she confided her revulsion toward the community’s cruelty and loveless existence, he answered with affection rather than condemnation.

They kept their relationship secret for six years. The mother belonged to the retinue of Tal Hajus, while her lover was a common warrior, so discovery would have subjected both to punishment before the assembled community. When a returning caravan brought young Green Martians to Thark, she hid with her child and then placed Sola among the other children in the plaza, knowing that the community’s distribution of the young would separate them. Sola was subsequently assigned to a chieftain’s retinue and never saw her mother again.

Tal Hajus imprisoned Sola’s mother and tried to discover the father’s identity. She did not reveal it and eventually died during the punishment inflicted on her. To protect her daughter, she claimed that she had killed Sola and thrown the body to the white apes. Sarkoja alone disbelieved the story, suspecting Sola’s real origin and, Sola believes, the identity of her father. Sola also knows that Sarkoja had betrayed her mother to Tal Hajus, a concealed act that links private family history to the community’s political authority.

Sola finally tells Carter that her father is Tars Tarkas. She entrusts him with the name without imposing conditions, reasoning that he may choose truth or a lie according to what would spare others suffering. The disclosure turns Sola’s concealed parentage into knowledge Carter may use for her, for Tars Tarkas, or for Dejah Thoris. It also shows that, although Green Martian custom denies the ordinary place of parents and children, biological kinship and personal loyalty remain consequential beneath the collective system.

Narrative Significance

Green Martian society is presented through a sustained tension between organized survival and the feelings its arrangements suppress. Egg selection, remote incubators, communal child-rearing, and early weapons training form a coherent response to scarcity as Carter understands it, but that order comes at the cost of family recognition and compassion. The narrative makes that cost legible through Sola’s separation from her mother and the mother’s refusal to betray the man she loves.

Carter’s treatment of animals offers a second, smaller challenge to the community’s assumptions. Where coercion is the ordinary means of controlling a thoat, he finds that trust produces both affection and greater reliability. Woola’s repeated protection of Carter gives that principle an independent consequence: the animal is not only a guard or a means of survival, but a loyal companion whose choices repeatedly alter Carter’s prospects. Together, these relationships complicate the image of a people defined by force. Their customs are harsh, but the narrative also shows suppressed bonds, chosen kindness, and the enduring power of loyalty within them.